Nearly all modern computing devices contain communications and data exchange capabilities. Laptop computers as well as Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) devices are routinely augmented with wireless communication capabilities. Cellular phones evolve to contain substantial amounts of storage and execute user applications or store data, such as contact lists, appointments, songs and video clips, and to support computing capabilities. Within this realm appeared the need for low priority data exchange between remote locations. Examples of such data exchange transactions are backup and restore of information, download of non-urgent information, antivirus database updates, subscription based song download, pushing of commercials to user terminals, and so on.
Modern communication networks and in particular wireless and mobile networks experience significant fluctuations of load from location to location and along the day. Communication service providers are trying to balance the network load by providing incentives to communicate during off-peak hours, such as by offering lower phone call tariffs at certain hours.
One of the applications discussed above is backup storage for which certain solutions have been proposed in the art.
US 20020156921 describes data back-up method for wireless device, which is based on receiving data from wireless device in response to a request for data back-up and storing the received data in a memory that is connected to network, and the service is provided when the device is in its idle mode.
US 20020111190 describes a base station that is used also for storing data from a portable data storage device, such as a personal digital assistant (PDA). The base station comprises a data storage device and a power supply. The PDA downloads data into the storage device and recharges an internal power source from the power supply. The data is stored in the base station as back-up of the data on the PDA.
However, none of the solutions discussed in the art have envisioned balancing (up to a certain degree) the load in access networks by encouraging the use of applications, which are carried out during off-peak periods of low/reduced load in the relevant access network.
Some of the access related standards that have been and are being developed by certain standardization bodies provide mechanisms to prioritize the user traffic according to its urgency (e.g. DOCSIS (“Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification”) and the Broadband Wireless Access standards IEEE 802.16 and ETSI's—HIPERMAN).
Five scheduling services are defined by these standards as mechanisms to meet the quality of service needs of the data flows carried over the airlink, both in the upstream and downstream directions. The scheduling service is associated to each connection at connection setup time. It determines the policy by which the connection (or the user terminal) is being polled and/or granted transmission opportunities.
Nevertheless, even the service with the least priority according to these standards, i.e. the Best Effort class of service, does not address the option of providing latency tolerant services which can tolerate delays on the order of minutes and hours, when appropriate network resources are available.